Unfortunately, there is no an official possibility to provide a bug report to Broadcom, so I hope, that some employee reads this thread.
In Workstation 17.6.1 doesn't work the compacting of VMDKs any more. You may use this function, the button to compact a HDD is there, but unfortunately it doesn't compact VMDKs.
The command line tool vmware-vdiskmanager.exe shows the same behavior: it "compacts" the virtual hard disk, but unfortunately the VMDK doesn't get compacted.
Important: this behavior is seen only on the "partially encrypted" VMs - these are VM, for which only the VMX files are encrypted to add TPM, but not the virtual hard disks.